Editorial: Intemperate climate of presidential excess

2013-06-25 16:32:36

President Barack Obama seems intent on going it alone these days. Whether it's NSA surveillance programs, patently unconstitutional recess appointments (which will soon go before the Supreme Court) or an executive order unilaterally implementing the DREAM Act, the president seems increasingly hell-bent on using presidential power to avoid consulting with Congress or the public.

A new entry was added to that list Tuesday, when Mr. Obama delivered a speech at Georgetown University, announcing that he is ordering the Environmental Protection Agency to craft rules that regulate carbon emissions from coal power plants. While the details of the plan remain murky, it's clear that the costs of the new regulation will be onerous – particularly to existing plants that will have to undergo costly retrofitting. As is inevitably the case with such regulatory exercises, those costs will end up being pushed on to consumers. They will also, of course, bleed the coal industry of jobs.

Any hopes that the administration's approach may be temperate are quickly dispelled by the memory of Mr. Obama, as a candidate in 2008, pledging to create an environment in which coal power – the nation's leading and cheapest source of electricity – is made so expensive that producers are driven into bankruptcy.

It bears remembering that this administration previously attempted such a sweeping reordering of the nation's energy production with the cap-and-trade bill it vigorously promoted during the president's first few years in office. The potential costs of that plan were so oppressive (the equivalent of a 15 percent tax hike, according to the Treasury Department) that it failed to win public favor or pass out of a Congress controlled entirely by Obama's Democratic allies. Most politicians would have regarded that result as a stop sign. For Mr. Obama, it apparently indicated only a detour.

Despite glib assurances by the president and his ideological allies that climate change is a potentially apocalyptic menace, the reality is decidedly more complex. In order to make the case for aggressive action, one must make a series of increasingly specific contentions: that global warming is occurring; that its effects are unambiguously baleful; that it is, at least in part, man-made; that there are government actions that can reverse its course; and that the benefits of those actions outweigh the costs.

If President Obama believes each of those assertions, he should make the case to Congress and the nation, not just a friendly audience on a college campus. If, as in the past, he fails, so be it. A fundamental reordering of the nation's economy cannot be undertaken simply as a matter of executive prerogative. The logic of governing a democracy has to be something more sophisticated than "because I said so."